'They showed me there a very terrible place . . . and all manner of tortures in that place . . . and there is no light there, but murky fire constantly flameth aloft, and there is a fiery river coming forth, and that whole place is everywhere fire . . . and those men said to me : This place is prepared for those who dishonour God, who on earth practise . . . magic- making, enchantments, and devilish witchcrafts, and who boast of their wicked deeds, stealing, lies, calumnies, envy, rancour, fornication, murder . . . for all these is prepared this place amongst these, for eternal inheritance ' (cf. also Asc. I». iv. 15).
In the Sib. Or. we have similar language, e.g. iL 313:
' And then shall all pass through the burning stream Of flame unquenchable.'
Again, in ii. 353 ff. we have :
• And deathless angels of the immortal God, Who ever is, shall bind with lasting bonds In chains of flaming fire, and from above Punish them all by scourge most terribly; And in Gehenna, in the gloom of night. Shall they be cast 'neath many horrid beasts Of Tartarus, where darkness is immense.' *
(3) In Rev 20" ' the lake of fire ' is further defined as ' the second death ' — a phrase which recurs in other passages of the book (e.g. 2"). The phrase seems traceable to Jewish sources, for it occurs frequently in the Targums (cf. Wetstein on Rev 2"). It seems likely that the Jews, in turn, de- rived it from the ideas of Egyptian religion, since we find Ani, seated on his judgment throne, say- ing, ' I am crowned king of the gods, I shall not die a second time in the underworld' (The Book of the Dead, ed. E. A. Wallis Budge, London, 1901, ch. xliv. ; cf. Moffatt in EGT, 1910, on Rev 2").
(h) St. Paul. — This idea of the 'second death' leads naturally to St. Paul's use of ' death ' in such passages as Ro 6-\ When the Apostle uses the word, he evidently intends by it ' something far deeper than the natural close of life. . . . For him death is one indivisible experience. It is the cor- relative of sin. . . . Death is regarded as separa- tion from God. ... So death, conceived as the final word on human destiny, becomes the synonym for hopeless doom' (Kennedy, St. Paul's Concep- tions of the Last Things, 1904, pp. 113-117).
(c) Other NT books.— This idea is also strongly and strikingly put in Ja 1^^ : ' Sin, when it is full- grown, bringeth forth death' (cf. 2 Ti P», He 2"). In Jude «• 12 and 2 P 2" we have the expressions
' darkness ' and ' the blackness of darkness ' used as descriptive epithets of the place of punishment. Once more we are face to face with the peculiar imagery of apocalyptic, and we recall how the word is employed in the Gospels, especially in the phrase 'the outer darkness' (cf. Mt S^^). In E71. X. 4 we read, ' Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness,' and throughout that book the imagery frequently recurs. The figure is a natural one, and needs no elaboration to make its force felt.
(d) Apostolic Fathers. — In turning to the Chris- tian literature of the 1st cent, that lies outside the NT, we do not find any very striking additions to
• These translations are taken from the English version by M. S. Terry, New York, 1899.
the ideas contained in the pages of the canonical books. In Did. 16 we read, 'All created mankind shall come to the tire of testing, and many shall be offended and perish,' which is only a faint reflexion of the Sj-noptic statements. In the Epistle of Barnahas, xx., the way of sin is described as 'a way of eternal death with punishment,' and then follows a list of sins reminiscent of Rev 21*. In the 8th Similitude of the Shtphcrd of Hennas — that of the tower-builders — there are manj' refer- ences to judgment, but they are couched in such general terms as 'shall lose his life,' 'these lost their life finally,' or ' these perished altogether unto God.' In Sim. IX. xviii. 2 there is a striking passage differentiating between the punishment of the ignorant and those who sin knowingly : ' They that have not known God, and commit wickedness, ai-e condemned to death ; but they that have known God and seen His mighty works, and yet commit wickedness, shall receive a double punish- nient, and shall die eternally.' In IX. xxviii. 7 it is said : ' Confess that ye have the Lord, lest denying Him ye be delivered into prison (efs dea-/xix}T7]piov).' There can be no doubt here that ' prison ' is meant to signify the place of punish- ment beyond death. Tlie imagery may be derived from the saying in Mt 5-^"-^, but we must remember that ' bonds and imprisonment ' were frequently the terms in which the apocalyptic literature figured future punishment.
(e) First-century apocalypses. — The conception that meets us in the Parable of Dives and Lazarus, viz. that tlie places of bliss and torment are visible the one from the other, meets us in two or three apocalypses of the 1st century. In the section of 2 Esdras discovered in 1875, we have one of these passages (vii. 36-38) :